Comic Talk, Tips and Tricks

I usually do all of my work with Photoshop– it gives a nice clean look to it. I'm usually doing the inking and coloring with my tablet. However, I went back to the good ol' pencil and ink way of drawing. It's really fun, and it feels a little more rewarding.

However, I've come to a speed bump.

When I clean up and try to color in Photoshop, when I delete the white to leave the lineart, it's not clean at all. When I zoom in, there's a bit of white around it. I'll give you guys an example in another post. But I'm wondering, what could've caused it? I don't press that hard with my pencil– could it be eraser residue, or something like that?

You don't need to delete the white to get the lines. The easiest way to color in photoshop would be to leave the linework on its own layer and set it to ‘mulitply.’ Then make it one of the top layers. Make a new, blank layer underneath that one to start putting colors on. You can still use the wand tool on the linework layer to select areas, just switch to the lower layer before you start filling in.

Also, you're probably scanning it wrong. Scan at 600dpi black and white monochrome only so your computer doesn't auto anti-alias. Then, resize to 300dpi using the nearest neighbor method to perserve your line art without the anti-aliasing. Finally, change the image mode to grayscale, double click the layer to unlock it from the background, click load channel as selection and cut and paste the line art to a new layer. Go back to the now blank layer and delete it to get it transparent.

From there, you can either color over the transparent layer or create new layers and flatten them (which is a whole other tutorial).